Bitcoin Blog a1

Sunday, October 15, 2017

More Forks

It seems bitcoin might have more forks up coming in the future, likely due to the success of the last hard fork, BCH. Despite my concerns that forks might cause confusion in the market and lower the price of bitcoin, it seems the opposite is true. Last time and this time, the price of bitcoin has raised prior to a fork. This new environment has made everyone have to take a stance on forks, like here is the policy for hard forks at my favorite faucet freebitco.in. (why not sign up right now)

HARD FORK POLICY

Bitcoin has 2 hard forks planned in the near future - "Bitcoin Gold" and "Bitcoin Segwit 2x". As we have done with the "Bitcoin Cash" hard fork in the past, we shall support withdrawals of all hard fork coins as long as they are viable - ie. have wallet support, a working blockchain and straightforward redemption policies. The "Bitcoin Gold" hard fork currently does not seem to be a viable fork - since they have not given any information about the fork on their website (btcgpu.org) and have no supported wallets yet. If there are no wallets that support it, we shall not be able to make "Bitcoin Gold" available for withdrawals. If however, there is wallet support for "Bitcoin Gold" before the hard fork date and the block number for the fork is announced in advance, we shall make it available for withdrawal.

We shall be supporting the "Bitcoin Segwit 2x" fork since it already has a working wallet and has announced the block number when the hard fork will happen. If a majority of miners switch to "Bitcoin Segwit 2x" and it has the chain with the most Proof-of-Work, we shall make it our primary coin and "Bitcoin Core" coins will be made available for withdrawal to your own wallets, otherwise "Bitcoin Core" shall remain our primary coin and "Bitcoin Segwit 2x" coins will be made available for withdrawal to your own wallets. In either case, users will receive coins in both the majority and minority chain equivalent to the balance that they had on the website prior to the hard fork.

We shall be pausing deposits and withdrawals temporarily before the "Bitcoin Segwit 2x" hard fork until a clear winner has emerged. Everything else on the website will function as usual. The fork is scheduled to happen at around the middle of November. We shall give advance notice of when deposits and withdrawals will be paused before the fork date.

It seems like a very accepting policy. Prior to the last bitcoin fork, many companies stated they would not honor the new fork. However, it seems most of the ones I dealt with did in fact give out BCH, although many did not have a continued use for it.

It has just come to my attention that ETH may have a fork tomorrow! Here is an article on it.